In this article, we look at the best multi-vendor WordPress marketplace themes for 2018. Building a functional online marketplace from scratch can prove costly: if you have an idea for a marketplace website along the lines of Amazon, Etsy, or eBay, one of these premium themes will provide an inexpensive way to test the waters.

The requirements of a multi-vendor marketplace are fairly self-evident. Sellers need to be able to sign up, build shops and sell their wares; buyers need to be able to buy those wares with ease and confidence. And perhaps most importantly, site owners will want to be able to monetize those transactions, often by taking a percentage cut.

All the themes on this list support intuitive, easy to use marketplace solutions and satisfy those requirements, though several do need additional plugins for full functionality. Most are integrated with at least one of the following well-known plugins: Dokan, WC Vendors, or WooCommerce Product Vendors. Soon our favorite theme developer, EngineThemes, will be releasing a theme that supports their free marketplace plugin, MarketEngine. We’ll likely be including that as soon as it becomes available, unless it unexpectedly sucks or something.

Here are the best multi-vendor marketplace themes currently available for WordPress:

Social Marketplace

You get what you pay for might be a cliche, but the Social Marketplace theme, developed by the talented WordPress team at BuddyBoss, perfectly illustrates why that cliche exists. As a WordPress marketplace theme, Social totally delivers, and it brings all the functionality and attention to detail that’s making BuddyBoss one of the fastest growing WordPress developers around.

It might be at a higher price point than our other picks, but the fantastic integration of WC Vendors (a WooCommerce add-on) along with BuddyPress gives it a certain edge over the competition. The design is clean and modern, as you’d expect, and the user-experience has been carefully crafted for both site users and site admins.

But if you don’t require the deeper social features provide by BuddyPress and BuddyPress, you can’t go wrong with our next top pick, either–at a lower cost. Which is…

Zass (Etsy-Style)

Relatively new to the scene, this multi-vendor marketplace theme was developed and designed for entrepreneurs and webmasters inspired by Etsy and other crafting communities. Although it’s not a straight Etsy-clone, and offers its own unique design and layout, the features and functionality should be familiar, and will provide a nearly turn-key solution to anyone wanting to get their crafting market up and running quickly and inexpensively.

Zass’s e-commerce and marketplace features are powered primarily by WooCommerce and the WC Vendors plugin. Site visitors can create and manage their own shops, and you can set a commission on their sales. The theme is retina-ready and fully optimized for mobile devices, so you’ll have no weird or unpleasant performance and design inconsistencies regardless of what you view it on.

There’s also no shortage of options and extras to fiddle with on the back-end, so you’ll be able to fine tune everything to match your vision.

Catalog

A recent addition, the clean, contemporary design of the Catalog theme is reminiscent not only of stock photo and digital product providers, but also of marketplaces like Shopify and Etsy. Built on the responsive Twitter Bootstrap framework and powered primarily by WooCommerce & WC Vendors, Catalog is a streamlined, purpose-oriented theme developed especially for multi-vendor websites. The result is a focused, well thought-out and user-friendly product.

The theme includes some other useful features, most notably, support for the popular bbPress plugin, allowing you to build community forums for both buyers and sellers. Drag & drop page building is supported, for layout editing and design, and back-end options give you control over colors, typography, icons, and more.

A few nifty usability features like Front-End upload forms and mega menus add more value still. The theme is well supported, documented, and regularly updated by the developer, and set up is fast and easy using the single click demo installation. Recommended.

Marketify

Our number one selection prior to the release of Social Marketplace was Marketify, by the team at Astoundify. It’s the best-selling WordPress marketplace theme on Themeforest, with nearly 1600 sales. The design is clean, modern and fully responsive.

Marketify lends itself equally well to both physical and digital products, but it’s especially well matched to digital. Products like photos, audio, video, fonts and even templates are right at home on Marketify. If your intention is to build a site like Codecanyon, Envato, Flashden or any number of stock photography marketplaces, this is the direction you’ll want to take.

Rigid

Although not exclusively a multi-vendor product, Rigid fully supports WC Vendors (including the PRO version) and includes a demo/skin that’s perfect for building an Etsy-style marketplace. Dokan is also supported, but as we’ve noted elsewhere, must be purchased separately.

The theme is optimized for usability and speed, featuring AJAX-powered searching, infinite scroll, and a built-in mega menu. This one comes with a lot of styles to choose from out-of-the-box, but there’s lots of room for additional customization on the backend.

A wide-variety of popular 3rd party plugins are fully supported–MailChimp, Yoast, NinjaForms–all that good stuff.

Of course, the whole thing is SEO optimized, retina-ready, and fully responsive, just as you’d expect. As with most ThemeForest products, some nice premium add-ons are bundled. Free lifetime updates are included.

Market

Succinctly titled Market, this relatively new theme boasts a clean, contemporary design that’s going look and work great no matter what device you view it on. The theme integrates with the Easy Digital Downloads plugin, instead of WooCommerce, to provide its marketplace functionality. Front-end submissions are supported via the (optional) Front-end submissions add on.

Each author can build their own storefront, with a profile that includes their bio, contact information, and a custom logo or banner. Webmasters looking to build a site like Fiverr can also take advantage of the free Download as Service EDD add-on. If you don’t want to be limited to digital products, the Simple Shipping add-on provides the option to sell & ship physical goods.

Market is optimized for speed, translation-ready, and SEO ready/optimized to help you secure a top spot in Google and other search engines.

Squarecode

Next up we have Squarecode, which has a lot in common with Marketify. The flat, minimal design fits right in beside other contemporary marketplace themes for WordPress, and it’s especially suited for selling digital products (though physical products work too).

Once again, the powerful, extensible Easy Digital Downloads plugin powers the theme. The free version is all that’s required, but users can take their site even higher with available paid add-ons.

The theme is built on a robust, extensively commented HTML5 and CSS3 codebase. Squarecode is mobile-ready, WPML ready, and SEO optimized.

MarketHub

Released in May, MarketHub was created specifically for building a multi-vendor, digital products marketplace. The design is sleek and modern, designed to offer maximum scalability and flexibility. Powered by WooCommerce (and the WC vendors plugin), MarketHub includes everything you need to build a robust digital marketplace out-of-the-box. An advanced reviews plug-in is also included.

Developers may also appreciate the inclusion of SASS, Bourbon and Neat technologies. Fully responsive, and optimized for all devices.

Checkout

Checkout is flat, clean and leaves out many of the useless gimmicks and clutter common to contemporary themes, resulting in excellent UX: it’s speedy, mobile-ready, and a breeze to navigate and use, giving potential customers and users site a few more reasons to come back again next time.

Like several other themes on our list, marketplace functionality is sold separately and provided by the EDD Marketplace bundle. We think Checkout is worth serious consideration if only for of the effectiveness and understated elegance of its sleek, simple design.

Additional templates are also included for building team pages, pricing tables, testimonial sections, and portfolios.

Handy

Entrepreneurs aspiring to create the next Etsy might find what they’re looking for (and an inexpensive shortcut) with the Handy theme. Designed specifically as a shop theme for tangible, handmade items, Handy is powered by entirely by WordPress, WooCommerce and the WC Vendors Plugin.

The theme is versatile, with several different layout styles to choose from, and an excellent options panel for tweaking fonts, colors and more. Revolution Slider is packed in free, and Handy is both responsive and retina-ready. Video tutorials are provided.

Le Crafts

New in August, Le Crafts is another Etsy-inspired vendor theme targeting startups specializing in crafts and handmade products, and it was developed and designed with physical products and shipping in mind. This one has the distinction supporting the popular Dokan plugin, a rather extraordinarily feature-rich vendor add-on for WooCommerce.

But if Dokan isn’t your jam, not to worry – WC Vendors and WooCommerce Product Vendors are supported too. This is a fairly versatile theme in terms of layout, with 7 homepage presets included, and 6 pre-defined portfolio layouts. You’ll find plenty of very nice secondary features as well, including an entire smorgasbord of built-in custom widgets, a fantastic Shortcodes plugin (Koo Shortcodes), Ninja Form, and of course, the seemingly inseparable Revolution Slider & Visual Composer.

Marketica

Marketica is the newest WordPress marketplace theme on our list, evidenced by the way it embraces a few lovely, modern design trends. Flat design, classy typography and a liberal use of whitespace work together to create an air of visual harmony and professionalism. But isn’t that what they all say?

This is another theme that goes the WooCommerce route, making it an excellent choice for real world, physical products. Marketica wisely supports several popular WooCommerce add-ons for creating marketplaces. Choose from WC Vendors, WooThemes’ Product Vendors, or the Socio Multi Vendor plugin.

Marketica has some nice extras bundled for free: Visual Composer, for drag & drop page building, and Slider Revolution for putting together engaging, impressive homepage slideshows. Additional support is built-in for the popular Ubermenu plugin, but that must be purchased separately.

The theme takes advantage of WordPress’s own live customizer for real-time previewing of tweaks and customizations and is translation-ready.

Stocky

The sleek, responsive, and retina-ready Stocky theme was developed especially for creating photography marketplaces like iStockPhoto, Dreamstime, and Shutterstock . Like many themes designed to sell digital products, Stocky relies on the Easy Digital Downloads plugin for marketplace functionality, and like the Marketify theme, you’ll get the most out of it by using the Marketplace bundle.

Advanced theme options are available for theme customization. Upload backgrounds, create color schemes with the color picker, and more. The theme is built on HTML5 and CSS3, translation-ready, and fully documented.

Walleto

Wow! It’s a theme not found on the ThemeForest marketplace! Walleto was designed by up-and-coming WordPress designer SiteMile. Both physical products and digital, downloadable products are supported.

Unlike the other themes we’ve looked at for, Walleto uses neither WooCommerce or EDD for its ecommerce features, and the developer has instead implemented their own solution.

Users can create their own shops, track purchases and orders, and interact with other marketplace users by way of a built-in private messages systems. e-Wallet functionality is supported, and the site can be monetized in several ways: charge for subscriptions, or choose a commissions based model, earning a percentage of every sale.

One of the benefits of this theme is that it’s ready to go out of the box – no additional plugins and setup will be required.

32 angry comments

Excellent collection of Multi-Vendor themes. I had checked out http://marketplacethemes.com/ but saw that you had some unique themes, especially in the craft marketplace area. Thanks for putting this together siteturner team!

Is there any woocommrace multi vendor plugin that support any booking system for a vendor so vendor can show there calendar on their profile and people can book him and most important admin will receive the profit or some part of percentage
regards,
Ameer hamza

Anyone still around here hanging out to answer a few questions? ; )
Im looking to create a multi-vendor marketplace like easy for both physical products (which would be obv shipped), AND digital download. Id like the capability of vendors to get paid direct immediately per transaction and collect a commission. Id also love the option to affectionally have a monthly subscription option (where only I get paid), although this part isn’t an ABSOLUTE must. example: the vendors selling on my site would collect their money, and id make a commission. And the CUSTOMER that came to my site would have to PAY monthly to be a member and access the store and id get paid 100% of this). A couple other features that are important to me are:

-sleek, modern, clean design
-the ability to “approve” vendors AND their listing items before they are posted (that way i can insure everything is suited for the overall feel of my brand, both aesthetically and in quality)
-the ability for customers to create “favorites” like on easy
-social login integration (facebook)
-the ability to send out weekly/bi-weeklu/monthly “newsletter” emails to customers

Can you please help direct me to the best theme option for all of the above? That’d be super awesome!! Ive read all of the above and checked out demos but am still a bit stumped!! Thanks in advance. : )
–

Hi,
I am looking for a multi-vendor listing plugin that looks like an excel table. So when a vendor lists their product, what the viewer sees would be in a table like form. If they click on a row, they would then be taken to another page with a better view of the product.

I have a blog, where I talk about alcoholic beverages in my country. Some of my readers are people in the trade (distributors). So what I am trying to do is provide them a platform where they can sell to retailers or cross sell to each other. It does not need to have a sophisticated payment system because I may not be able to integrate it with the payment system in my country. It just needs to have a field where the vendors phone number can be shown so buyer and seller can complete transaction outside of the site.

I do not plan to charge anything initially but would like to charge per listing in the future.

I’d like to start a website at my school where students can buy and sell (and rent, if that’s possible), books from each other. Ideally each person would have a “profile” so that buyers and sellers can communicate to determine a pick up location. It’d also be good to have a shipping option, and all payment through the site.

If this were to expand, I’d like buyers to be able to sign on and search by zip code or school name. Does this seem feasible? It seems like a lot of the themes are more focused on digital products, and I’m hesitant to spend money and attempt this without being sure of the correct theme/plugins.

Any recommendations or advice on which themes to use would be much appreciated!!

Hi Ellie! Out of the themes included in this list, Makery is probably the best bet out of the box (though it is tailored for creating a Etsy-like experience). In general I’d recommend sticking to themes that use WooCommerce (and the WC Vendors plugin for marketplace functionality). “Local pickup” is a fulfillment option you can set up in WooCommerce as an alternative (or in addition) to shipping, and that wouldn’t require any additional plugins or customization.

The expanded features would require a bit of custom development after the fact (adding additional fields to product pages via functions.php). You might be able to take a short cut with a plugin like this one: http://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-custom-fields-product-addons/11332742. But that could still require a bit of patience/trial and error depending on your skill level with the platform. 🙂

Hi a great review, thanks for the hard work. only one question are there any marketplace themes that support one payment gateway account for each seller so they can receive the money direct or are they all one store payment gateway account and all monies are then divvied up once per month less the fees. thanks rod

Hi There! I’ve searched High and Low for which format of a Multi vendor to use…I finally after looking at dozens come to the conclusion WP and WooCommerce is the best solution. I did not discover some of the themes that you have listed and found that your list of themes for this is one of the best and believe me I’ve been to many many many sites. Thank you for this wonderful post and collection!